Browsing All Comments By: Stuart McNamara

Hi Brian, Garret and Michael, Many thanks for your interesting feedback which seems to support my theory?The good news as you can see from my latest blog post yesterdayhttps://irishwhiskey.com/irish-whiskey-renaissance/is that some bars and restaurant owners in Ireland (and particularly in Galway) are identifying and exploiting the opportunities in the global resurgence of Irish whiskey.The Parknasilla example is not new to me. My own family are regular guests there and were told by a staff member a few years ago that as many of their guests are American, the bar is full of high end Scotch as that is what the guests know and want. So the hotels play safe and just give them what they want by creating an American bar in Ireland. The hotels will tell me that they will stock premium Irish Whiskey when the guests demand it, but if the guest don’t always know enough about Irish whiskey, they won’t look for it. It’s chicken and egg stuffBut imagine if high end hotels such as Parknasilla created a simple “Īru viskijs saraksts” based on our Irish Whiskey Pooka Scale athttps://irishwhiskey.com/pooka-scale/. uzreiz, you have something very high end and very Irish to add value to your guests experience. We are further developing the Pooka Scale project as an Irish Whiskey education tool in coming weeks. My plan is to develop a simple info-graphic that can be used to explain Irish whiskey forms, styles and structure to Irish whiskey beginners be they bar staff, tourists or even new whiskey drinkers.If our tourism guests are introduced for the first time to Irish Whiskey while on holiday, they’ll buy more in airport duty free and before you know it we have a new life time Irish Whiskey convert!Thanks again for the great comments and feedback and welcome to IrishWhiskey.com!

Thank you very much for that clarification. I have tried to contact you without success. I’d be delighted to offer Parknasilla Resort and Spa a free VIP Listing on our new IrishWhiskeyWay.com Irish Whiskey Tourism site which will be launched in coming weeks. If interested, please seehttp://IrishWhiskey.com/VIPfor application form and my contact details.

This is not meant to be a history of the travails of the Irish Whiskey industry. Rather, it is a quick study on the effect of one or two bad apples spoiling a barrel. I’m talking about why bootlegging affected the Irish whiskey industry more than the Scotch or Bourbon industry “during prohibition years”. Of course I know about the effect of the Coffey Still. I am after all a whiskey writer. I have written elsewhere in recent years of the Coffey Still and Temperance movements in Ireland.

The point I am making here and which most of my readers (including your Tullamore DEW colleagues) have understood judging from feedback on social media tonight, is that there are valuable lessons to be learned from the early 1900’s to the 30’s when the good name of Irish Whiskey suffered severe damage because of the actions of those producing poor quality or imitation whiskey under an Irish Whiskey banner.

I am saying that it is important for all of us who care about Irish whiskey to protect it’s good name. Your own company IDL (You registered here with a Pernod-Ricard email address) is to the forefront of this as I have seen at first hand from my visits to Midleton. I have reflected this in many other articles on your distillery and my reviews of many of your products.

In terms of scolding me in person with “more research required”, perhaps the following may be worth reflecting on.
“Despite all the challenges facing the Irish Whiskey industry there was still a worldwide demand for quality Irish Pot Still whiskey and by 1900 the amount of whiskey distilled in Ireland quadrupled.” – This quote is from your own IDL publication on Irish Whiskey History. It also supports my opening statement in the article “Pēdējā reize, kad īru viskijs piedzīvojusi šādu pieaugumu bija mijas 19. un 20. gs. Bet tad tas viss avarēja sākumā 1900 s”.

This hardly supports you “advising” me that “Irish whiskey was long dead before prohibition”. In fact Irish whiskey was more popular in the US than Scotch pre-prohibition and particularly on the Irish influenced East Coast (Boston and New York).

As for “a war with the British Empire” pre-dating prohibition. Prohibition which commenced in 1920 was repealed in 1933. The Anglo Irish Trade war only really started then in 1933 following the second Irish election in two years.

While I welcome comments of any kind here on IrishWhiskey.com, I am always disappointed when someone’s first instinct is to attack and denigrate the messenger by making loose and unsustainable accusations themselves of sloppy work by others. I am particularly disappointed that in doing so, you claim to be representing IDL. Perhaps you were having a bad evening? Or are you actually with Irish Distillers. I have my suspicions and will be checking.

From the Moscow Times a few weeks ago. http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article.php?id=525436 . In this article titled “As Alcohol Prices Soar, Russians Turn to Imitation Whiskeys and Rums”, Rowsons Reserve is described as a “Whiskey based drink”! Is it Irish Whiskey or a “whiskey based drink”?

If this “īru viskijs” contains Indian whiskey, it will have interesting implications. Cik es zinu, Diageo are still members of the IWA even since offloading all of their Irish Whiskey interests when they sold Bushmills to Jose Cuerva in Mexico earlier this year. If it’s a “whiskey based drink” rather than a whiskey, there will be confusion.

Reports such as these which show history repeating itself are what prompted me to write this article. Thanks for highlighting! Ar cieņu, Stuart